good things fall apart • sirius black

Important business

The boys' dorm was an explosion of all of their personalities, including Ellie's, all crammed into the small space. Everything adorn in scarlet and gold, there was no mistaking the Marauders were proud of their house and James even had his Gryffindor scarf pinned to his headboard. The room had been their home for three years already and it had grown as they had. It became more personalised as the years went by and now it was a hub of everything that made them, well... them.

Books encircled Remus' bed in stacks according to whether he'd read them or not, but then they also found themselves dotted around the rest of the room too. There was even one novel living permanently in the bathroom. Having a great disliking for the moon, Remus made sure he had the bed closest to the door and the furthest from the window, preferring to stay in the pitch black at night.

Peter was in the next bed along, immediately adjacent to the window, for he was the exact opposite and liked a little light to sleep with. His bed was surrounded with discarded boxes of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans that contained the cast aside flavours, piles of different chocolate frog cards, and his bedside table housed a stack of letters from his mother and father.

The other bed next to the window was James', having clothes everywhere and the whole contents of his trunk strewn across the rest of the room. As much as he was good at organising everyone else, he couldn't get his own things together to save his life, and usually spent a lot of his free time looking for lost possessions. He had a patchwork blanket of all the different British Quidditch teams, that was always found on his bed whether it was summer or winter, and his invisibility cloak lived under his pillow safely. The amount of time the messy haired boy spent sorting out his hair in the morning, meant he'd also had to have the room closest to the bathroom, so he was able to dart in their first.

Sirius, of course, occupied the last bed and he was the one of the four that had the least amount of clutter going on. His bed was never made, the draws of his bedside table always open, but the only thing that obviously made it his, was his Beater's bat fixed to two hooks on the wall. Peter had told him it seemed like quite a violent thing to have on display, but this only made the handsome boy more satisfied with the spot he chose for it. The rest of his things were packed carefully away in his trunk, shoved under his bed - any memories of his family tucked physically away inside.

The room was completely chaos, an array of everything that meant anything to them, but that's what made it so special.

Despite the dorm not technically being hers, Ellie still managed to make her mark. And almost everywhere, at that.

Hung on the ceiling was a huge tapestry of a lion, so that if you lay on your back on the floor, you could stare at it - house and family pride wasn't shown discretely. One of Remus' bed posts had the phases of the moon elegantly painted onto it and when Sirius had seen her do it, he insisted that he get a painting too. He'd then helped her map out a carefully constructed replica of the Canis Major constellation above his bed, which she painted intricately, decorating the space around it with beautiful coloured stars. Ellie wasn't quite sure what McGonagall would say about her painting all over the furniture, but that was something to worry about in the future. Other of her sketches were pinned on the walls, a collection of them clustered next to James' bed were the most distinctive, displaying a series of events that led to the boys all ending in a pile on the common room sofa.

The thing that tied the room together though, lived next to the door, between Remus and Sirius' beds.

Back in first year, James was brought a record player by his parents for Christmas, so of course he had to bring it back to Hogwarts with him to show everyone. Usually, muggle things didn't work within the castle grounds, and it took a lot of old book reading to learn how to get it to work in the boys' dorm. Remus was the one that figured it out eventually, but it took a very long time, in which, the five friends all piled up different records they could get their hands on.